The Boy Who Had Everything - the title of Stephen Wallace's second feature suggests a fairy tale, some sweet suburban variant of a fable of ideal youth. But it's also, of course, an omen - since to say that someone had everything is to hint at failure, disillusion and loss.

Going as a 'schoolboy god' to a Sydney university college in the mid-1960s, John Kirkland (Jason Connery) is certainly perceived by others as an exemplary figure. Blond, clean-cut handsome, affluent, athletic, inexpressive John sums up the highest aspirations of a calm and sunny little society. Yet when he comes up against the savage humiliations of the college "fresher" system, his honest and rather humourless devotion to doing his duty as a model youth disintegrates. He not only confronts the prospect of "failure" in the fresher-system's terms, and finds himself forced to invent his own standards of success; he must also face the ambiguities and secret horrors of his previous state of perfection, especially in relation to his bitter, flamboyant mother (Diane Cilento) and his fond but conventional girlfriend (Laura Williams). The fable of ideal youth turns into a hard, sometimes gruelling drama of social and emotional education - dense with the varying moods that writer-director Wallace creates with such precision and finesse.

Stories of maturation and personal development have an almost obsessive importance in the traditions of both literature and cinema in Australia (My Brother Jack, The Education of Young Donald, My Brilliant Career, The Getting of Wisdom, Puberty Blues...) and for several reasons The Boy Who Had Everything is a superb reworking of the genre. One is the combination of an abrasive directness in the presentation of emotion, with a mellow lucidity in its treatment of the characters - recalling Wallace's acclaimed short drama, The Love Letters from Teralba Road. Another is its harrowing vision of aspects of masculinity barely touched on in Australian cinema since Wake In Fright. Gang rituals, and the gap between public image and private devastation, are treated in the genteel urban context of The Boy Who Had Everything with a spirit which is as unflinching as Kotcheff's, yet more forgiving.

Above all, The Boy Who Had Everything is a fine historical film about the Menzies era. In its street scenes as well as its domestic conflicts, the film beautifully evokes the beginning of the end of an age of golden parochialism, with old certainties colliding blindly with new forces, and yet not really registering the shock. Through the college charade with its ruthless insistence on masks and roles, and its stagey reproduction of imagined British customs, The Boy Who Had Everything interprets mid-1960s, middle class Australia as a purely theatrical society in which people are condemned to ham-acting for life. The uniformly excellent performances capture this precisely and painfully, with Jason Connery outstanding as the boy so rigid with inadmissible emotions, that at times he can barely speak.

With its unusual combination of both intelligence and feeling, The Boy Who Had Everything is a major event In an Australian cinema that has recently shown very little trace of either quality.

Meaghan Morris